OMELIE / Omelie EN

07 ott 2018

07/10/2018  27th Sunday in O. T. - B 

07/10/2018  27^th Sunday in O. T. - B 

Reading 1, GN 2,18-24 * Psalm 127 * Reading 2, HEB 2,9-11 * Gospel, MK 10,2-16

Today’s Gospel regards a plague that, in our western world is already big and painful. Are before everybody’s eyes the families destroyed and the following disorders. Sufferings, anger, disagreements come one after the other and they pile up in the heart and in the mind of men and women, who do not know where and how to find true peace anymore! Are before everybody’s eyes also the serious psychological, social, physical and spiritual damages in children and young people who have to live like nomads going from one house to the other, from one affection to the other, divided and stretched between mothers and stepmothers, fathers and stepfathers. They become men without knowing harmony, love, family, unity, concord, faithfulness.

What can be done? God’s word, if obeyed, creates well-being, brings serenity, life, harmony. Jesus reminds of it today whoever has made up solutions in order to make men happy, to please their desires and their mistakes, their loving feelings and their hardness of heart. Jesus points out the true way: going back to the very first intention of God. On this resolution needs to be based our life; it is necessary to shape the mind and the heart to the light of the Father’s word, to be oriented by the love that enlightens from above.

Our families break up because the spouses did not prepare for true love, and this has been confused for pleasure or gain. If a person thinks that they are loved when they are pleased, or thinks to love the other when they please them, after a while they feel like slaves, and, on their turn, they become suffocating; that «love» reveals itself as deception, and makes the desire of a new freedom grow. True love is learnt from faith, from closeness to God and from the obedience to Him. Families keep united when the faith of the spouses is greater than their feeling, when faith is the source of their love, when their faith is strong and on point, when the faith sees and listens to the living and true God.

Jesus’ advice is to look at marriage with God’s eyes, and to listen again to His word: “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”… “what God has joined together, no human being must separate”!

Is it possible for a man to indissolubly unite himself to a woman? And why their union needs to be considered perpetual? The woman is introduced to the man by God. The man finds her in waking up from his sleep, he receives her from the hands of God, he recognizes her as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” because God has taken action.

God prepared for men “a suitable partner for Him”, “brought to the man”, who can complete or correct the emptiness and lacks in his heart, in his thoughts, in his desires. He needs to be aware that the woman was not looked for or found by himself, but he received her as a gift from the Father as an amazing surprise, and therefore he needs to love and respect her as a gift of God’s. The woman needs to be for the man a “peer”, a person who can say yes to him, but also no, in case he would let himself to be taken far from God. The man needs to be for the woman a person who teaches how to keep ourselves in touch in order to let God shape us. In order for the man and the woman to be what they have to be for each other, it is necessary that they have reached maturity. Each one of them needs to be able to live without support, alone, otherwise they will be a burden for each other, they will suffocate each other, and they will try to free themselves in order to unite themselves to somebody else. Maturity of life can be reached when we cultivate our interior life, an intimate relationship with God, when we find the source of being and acting inside us. This happens when we cling to Jesus as vine shoots, filling ourselves with His presence, following His wisdom, leaning on His shepherd «rod».

He suffered and entered death in order to be our leader, to be the one to guide us to salvation (reading 2). He knows that we are His God and Father’s creatures and therefore He is not ashamed to call us His brothers and sisters. We are still sinners, we still need to be forgiven, redeemed, sanctified. He is not ashamed of us, on the contrary, He offers Himself to sanctify us, in order for our life to become a sign of God. Even the family life, the union of the spouses in particular, becomes sign and tool of the divine love. This is why Christians celebrate their marriage during the Eucharistic sacrifice: their love is expression of the very love of Jesus for the Father, of Jesus for the Church, of the Church for its Lord: it is a love that has become great and perfect on the cross. And it is looking at Jesus’ cross that the spouses will find the strength and peace to keep giving themselves to one another. If Jesus’ love is still alive in them, they will keep deepening their union with one another and they will find in it strength, joy, peace, wisdom, salvation.